Saturday, June 18, 2011

And Now for Something Entirely Different…

Greetings, readers of Do A Spot Check! I am Endos, summoner of centipedes, frequenter of the evil axis, co-creator of alignment charts, editor for the site, and mayor of a little village up the coast(very scenic in the springtime. You should visit sometime). Raz is currently occupied/on vacation/dead so I’ll be writing this week’s post.

Raz got me involved in D&D about a year ago, and I’ve been an enthusiast of the game since then, but this year I’m going to try my hand at DMing for the first time. Now, as any typical first-time DM might do, I’ll be borrowing many of my ideas from D&D related comics and videos like Order of the Stick and Unforgotten Realms, but I’m also taking ideas from the readers of Do A Spot Check. That’s right! If you have fantastic and epic ideas and want to share them, now’s your opportunity! If you have suggestions for things to pit Raz and his teammates up against, please leave them in the comments section and I’ll be sure to include them in some fashion in the next campaign. The more outlandish and ridiculous the premise, the better!

Second item on the agenda: League of Legends. You may have heard of this game before, but if you have not, allow me to explain. League of Legends (LoL) is a free online game created by the same people who constructed DotA Allstars. League of Legends (and DotA, by extension) is a game where there are two teams with a Nexus at the center of each base, which each team is attempting to destroy. Teams are usually comprised of 5 “Champions” that all stem from the basic fantasy classes in D&D. There are mage and fighter and cleric-like heroes, but some heroes embody the class exactly. Tryndamere is a Barbarian through and through, Akali is rogue/assassin, and Lee-Sin is a monk, and just as kick-ass as the ones in D&D. The paths to each base are guarded by periodic towers that require large amounts of firepower to bring down. The game is centered around PVP combat, but you can play with teammates against the a computer team if you wish. Raz and I have been spending a fair amount of time honing our skills in this game. The entire game is online and free to download in an hour. The trailer for the game is here:

If you try it and like it, feel free to add Raz and I to your in-game friends list and we’ll be happy to give you tips or play cooperatively with you. Our in-game names are Innersist and Randomocity132, respectively. To download the game visit LoL’s main page here.

Alrighty, now that that’s taken care of, this is usually the part where Raz posts tips for players and DM’s, so let’s get to it.

Player Tip of the Week

Don’t be afraid to find others who play D&D in the networks of people you know. A lot of the reason that people don’t go out and try to find others who also play D&D is because of the stigma that the name “Dungeons and Dragons” carries. People are sometimes worried of what others will think of them when they find out that they play D&D, but you don’t need to be super-secretive about it. Raz and I played D&D with a group of friends at our college for months without realizing that there were actually nearly two dozen veteran players on campus, many of which we already knew personally. Several of them have graduated now, and we would have had a chance to play with them, had we told them earlier in the year that we played. You don’t have to shout it at people, but let it be known, you never know who else might be a player.

DM Tip of the Week

Be flexible playing with new players you don’t already know. This goes along with the above tip. If you do happen to find others who are interested in the game, find a way to incorporate them in your campaign. You can start them off at a higher level if it’s been going on for a while.

Alrighty then. That just about wraps up this week’s post. I hope you enjoyed it. This is Endos, signing out.

2 comments:

Obviously you need an awakened half-dragon dire centipede warlock as a druidic villain's henchthing. Nothing better than a giant armor-plated vermin spitting eldritch blasts flying and warping about the battlefield. Might change its swarm and discorporation invocations to centipedes instead of bats though. If the primary villain cares to know what it's thinking he may get Tongues permanencied on it so it can speak Common, lol.